arXiv subjects

Sterling G. Baird

Publications and source records attributed to Sterling G. Baird.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Retrofitting a commercial RF induction generator into a computer-controlled, vacuum and gas integrated annealing system for reactive-metal grain growth

High-temperature vacuum annealing near a metal's melting point drives controlled grain growth, but it normally requires an expensive turn-key vacuum induction furnace. We retrofit a bare commercial radio frequency (RF) induction generator with computer power control through LabVIEW, dual-wavelength optical temperature feedback, and a high-vacuum quartz-tube chamber with inert-gas backfill. A machined graphite crucible doubles as a susceptor, an RF-absorbing element that heats the specimen it encloses. The only requirement is a monotonic analog power-control input, so the retrofit transfers between generators. Our reference build uses a 6 kW solid-state generator. Surprisingly, nickel annealed in this system produced high-quality electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) patterns with zero specimen preparation. Samples went directly from the furnace to the electron microscope without grinding, polishing, or etching. The EBSD maps indexed hundreds of equiaxed grains delineated by deep thermal grooves. A modified sample assembly extends the furnace to ceramics that do not couple to the RF field. It coarsened yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) grains in 45 min at 2500°, compared with 228h at 1600° in a conventional box furnace. For a fixed configuration, the power-temperature calibration is linear ($R^2$ = 0.991) from 1200 to 1400°. Eight 12h nickel anneals at 1200° reproduced their soak temperature to 1201.2 $\pm$ 1.3°, and 40h soaks at 1325° remained stable. Complete design files, a bill of materials, control software, and data are openly available. This gives laboratories an affordable route to near-melting-point annealing with direct anneal-to-EBSD characterization.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2026

From Prompt to Protocol: Fast Charging Batteries with Large Language Models

Efficiently optimizing battery charging protocols is challenging because each evaluation is slow, costly, and non-differentiable. Many existing approaches address this difficulty by heavily constraining the protocol search space, which limits the diversity of protocols that can be explored, preventing the discovery of higher-performing solutions. We introduce two gradient-free, LLM-driven closed-loop methods: Prompt-to-Optimizer (P2O), which uses an LLM to propose the code for small neural-network-based protocols, which are then trained by an inner loop, and Prompt-to-Protocol (P2P), which simply writes an explicit function for the current and its scalar parameters. Across our case studies, LLM-guided P2O outperforms neural networks designed by Bayesian optimization, evolutionary algorithms, and random search. In a realistic fast charging scenario, both P2O and P2P yield around a 4.2 percent improvement in state of health (capacity retention based health metric under fast charging cycling) over a state-of-the-art multi-step constant current (CC) baseline, with P2P achieving this under matched evaluation budgets (same number of protocol evaluations). These results demonstrate that LLMs can expand the space of protocol functional forms, incorporate language-based constraints, and enable efficient optimization in high cost experimental settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Honegumi: An Interface for Accelerating the Adoption of Bayesian Optimization in the Experimental Sciences

Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged as a powerful tool for guiding experimental design and decision-making in various scientific fields, including materials science, chemistry, and biology. However, despite its growing popularity, the complexity of existing BO libraries and the steep learning curve associated with them can deter researchers who are not well-versed in machine learning or programming. To address this barrier, we introduce Honegumi, a user-friendly, interactive tool designed to simplify the process of creating advanced Bayesian optimization scripts. Honegumi offers a dynamic selection grid that allows users to configure key parameters of their optimization tasks, generating ready-to-use, unit-tested Python scripts tailored to their specific needs. Accompanying the interface is a comprehensive suite of tutorials that provide both conceptual and practical guidance, bridging the gap between theoretical understanding and practical implementation. Built on top of the Ax platform, Honegumi leverages the power of existing state-of-the-art libraries while restructuring the user experience to make advanced BO techniques more accessible to experimental researchers. By lowering the barrier to entry and providing educational resources, Honegumi aims to accelerate the adoption of advanced Bayesian optimization methods across various domains.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

JARVIS-Leaderboard: A Large Scale Benchmark of Materials Design Methods

Lack of rigorous reproducibility and validation are major hurdles for scientific development across many fields. Materials science in particular encompasses a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches that require careful benchmarking. Leaderboard efforts have been developed previously to mitigate these issues. However, a comprehensive comparison and benchmarking on an integrated platform with multiple data modalities with both perfect and defect materials data is still lacking. This work introduces JARVIS-Leaderboard, an open-source and community-driven platform that facilitates benchmarking and enhances reproducibility. The platform allows users to set up benchmarks with custom tasks and enables contributions in the form of dataset, code, and meta-data submissions. We cover the following materials design categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electronic Structure (ES), Force-fields (FF), Quantum Computation (QC) and Experiments (EXP). For AI, we cover several types of input data, including atomic structures, atomistic images, spectra, and text. For ES, we consider multiple ES approaches, software packages, pseudopotentials, materials, and properties, comparing results to experiment. For FF, we compare multiple approaches for material property predictions. For QC, we benchmark Hamiltonian simulations using various quantum algorithms and circuits. Finally, for experiments, we use the inter-laboratory approach to establish benchmarks. There are 1281 contributions to 274 benchmarks using 152 methods with more than 8 million data-points, and the leaderboard is continuously expanding. The JARVIS-Leaderboard is available at the website: https://pages.nist.gov/jarvis_leaderboard

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2023

What is missing in autonomous discovery: Open challenges for the community

Self-driving labs (SDLs) leverage combinations of artificial intelligence, automation, and advanced computing to accelerate scientific discovery. The promise of this field has given rise to a rich community of passionate scientists, engineers, and social scientists, as evidenced by the development of the Acceleration Consortium and recent Accelerate Conference. Despite its strengths, this rapidly developing field presents numerous opportunities for growth, challenges to overcome, and potential risks of which to remain aware. This community perspective builds on a discourse instantiated during the first Accelerate Conference, and looks to the future of self-driving labs with a tempered optimism. Incorporating input from academia, government, and industry, we briefly describe the current status of self-driving labs, then turn our attention to barriers, opportunities, and a vision for what is possible. Our field is delivering solutions in technology and infrastructure, artificial intelligence and knowledge generation, and education and workforce development. In the spirit of community, we intend for this work to foster discussion and drive best practices as our field grows.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

High-dimensional Bayesian Optimization of Hyperparameters for an Attention-based Network to Predict Materials Property: a Case Study on CrabNet using Ax and SAASBO

Expensive-to-train deep learning models can benefit from an optimization of the hyperparameters that determine the model architecture. We optimize 23 hyperparameters of a materials informatics model, Compositionally-Restricted Attention-Based Network (CrabNet), over 100 adaptive design iterations using two models within the Adaptive Experimentation (Ax) Platform. This includes a recently developed Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithm, sparse axis-aligned subspaces Bayesian optimization (SAASBO), which has shown exciting performance on high-dimensional optimization tasks. Using SAASBO to optimize CrabNet hyperparameters, we demonstrate a new state-of-the-art on the experimental band gap regression task within the materials informatics benchmarking platform, Matbench (~4.5% decrease in mean absolute error (MAE) relative to incumbent). Characteristics of the adaptive design scheme as well as feature importances are described for each of the Ax models. SAASBO has great potential to both improve existing surrogate models, as shown in this work, and in future work, to efficiently discover new, high-performing materials in high-dimensional materials science search spaces.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

Data-Driven Materials Discovery and Synthesis using Machine Learning Methods

Experimentally [1-38] and computationally [39-50] validated machine learning (ML) articles are sorted based on the size of the training data: 1-100, 101-10000, and 10000+ in a comprehensive set summarizing legacy and recent advances in the field. The review emphasizes the interrelated fields of synthesis, characterization, and prediction. Size range 1-100 consists mostly of Bayesian optimization (BO) articles, whereas 101-10000 consists mostly of support vector machine (SVM) articles. The articles often use combinations of ML, feature selection (FS), adaptive design (AD), high-throughput (HiTp) techniques, and domain knowledge to enhance predictive performance and/or model interpretability. Grouping cross-validation (G-CV) techniques curb overly optimistic extrapolative predictive performance. Smaller datasets relying on AD are typically able to identify new materials with desired properties but do so in a constrained design space. In larger datasets, the low-hanging fruit of materials optimization is typically already discovered, and the models are generally less successful at extrapolating to new materials, especially when the model training data favors a particular type of material. The large increase of ML materials science articles that perform experimental or computational validation on the predicted results demonstrates the interpenetration of materials informatics with the materials science discipline and an accelerating materials discovery for real-world applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Five Degree-of-Freedom Property Interpolation of Arbitrary Grain Boundaries via Voronoi Fundamental Zone Octonion Framework

We introduce the Voronoi fundamental zone octonion interpolation framework for grain boundary (GB) structure-property models and surrogates. The VFZO framework offers an advantage over other five degree-of-freedom based property interpolation methods because it is constructed as a point set in a manifold. This means that directly computed Euclidean distances approximate the original octonion distance with significantly reduced computation runtime (~7 CPU minutes vs. 153 CPU days for a 50000x50000 pairwise-distance matrix). This increased efficiency facilitates lower interpolation error through the use of significantly more input data. We demonstrate grain boundary energy interpolation results for a non-smooth validation function and simulated bi-crystal datasets for Fe and Ni using four interpolation methods: barycentric interpolation, Gaussian process regression (GPR), inverse-distance weighting, and nearest-neighbor interpolation. These are evaluated for 50000 random input GBs and 10 000 random prediction GBs. The best performance was achieved with GPR, which resulted in a reduction of the root mean square error (RMSE) by 83.0% relative to RMSE of a constant, average model. Likewise, interpolation on a large, noisy, molecular statics Fe simulation dataset improves performance by 34.4% compared to 21.2% in prior work. Interpolation on a small, low-noise MS Ni simulation dataset is similar to interpolation results for the original octonion metric (57.6% vs. 56.4%). A vectorized, parallelized, MATLAB interpolation function (interp5DOF.m) and related routines are available in our VFZO repository (github.com/sgbaird-5dof/interp) which can be applied to other crystallographic point groups. The VFZO framework offers advantages for computing distances between GBs, estimating property values for arbitrary GBs, and modeling surrogates of computationally expensive 5DOF functions and simulations.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗